


Rising, Falling

by Hopetohell



Series: End of the World [1]
Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Gore, Other, Psychological Trauma, Smut, Torture, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:55:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25100494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hopetohell/pseuds/Hopetohell
Summary: A fox will gnaw off its own limb to get free of the snare.Walker has a series of Very Bad Days, and he is not coping. An exercise in what-if.
Relationships: August Walker/original character
Series: End of the World [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1856770
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	Rising, Falling

**Burn it to the ground**

Oh my dearest, oh my darling, the blood of you is worked into the walls, the tile, soaking everywhere so that standing in this room is like standing inside you. How the red ropes of you are clutched in your hands and you are _gasping._ How the very light of the room is tinted red. 

How you shiver. 

How you shake. 

When they come for you, oh my darling, you cannot stand but only curl into yourself, curl around yourself and your hair is painted red, face red over white, eyes rolled white over blue, pupils pinpricks. When they save you and stitch you only so they can rend you apart again, you scream but your voice is wrecked and gone. 

How they have abandoned you, my darling. The call went out and no one came. They heard you, oh my darling, and someone will light a candle for you but no one will come. They’ve dug your grave and filled it with the bric-a-brac from your desk, an empty urn, white lilies and a brown suit, detritus of a life wasted in pursuit of a better world. _Martyr,_ they call you, when they mean _sacrifice_. Partners and lovers sigh and remember you as the hurricane they imagined you to be and not the hammer you were.

Are. 

When they come for you, your fingers clench. When they leave again, you hold your scars and hope for daylight. Your nails are torn and some are missing. You hold your pain and condense it inside yourself. 

My darling, do you dream here? In this room where the fluorescent bulbs are always blinking, where they try to break you endlessly, do you sleep? Or does your awareness merely flicker in and out, in and out, days marked by nothing save by pain?

Do you see it? How they’ve begun to slow and soften in your presence? How the threat of you is dissolving from their minds? 

Do you see the gap between the door and doorframe?

They take their tools but leave the tray and that is their next mistake. You lose another nail, two nails, smearing blood like you have any left to lose but oh my darling, now you have it. 

When they come for you again you take their lives and then their clothes, steel shards opening their arteries, then your fingers fumble buttons shut, clothes too short but too loose for the size of you, the starved and crumbling tower of your body. Your legs shake and oh my darling, standing twists your guts in knots. 

But you do stand. 

And then you walk. 

And then. 

They fall where you find them, though you try not to. Each movement has its cost and already you’ve spent too much of yourself. 

And oh my darling, when you breathe the outside air again, when you make the call from a phone flung at you by a frightened jogger, when they come to claim you with their unmarked van and their medics, when you lie in your bed surrounded by white walls and endless men with endless questions, then,

Oh my darling, 

Oh my dearest,

You decide. 

You will burn it all, and from the ashes you will birth a better world. 

—-  
**Everything is beautiful (how it hurts)**

It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. You won’t— You wake, wild-eyed, the taste of blood on your tongue. You wipe your eyes, shove the dream deep inside yourself. _Dear one, I hold your heart here in this room. When you run I will find you. When you hide I will see you. When you scream and shout I will swallow your sounds and keep them for my own._

Maybe it doesn’t matter so much. Maybe all you need to do is to wrap yourself in the memory, let it pass through you and away. But it’s cold and your bones hurt. Winter has come and all your badly-set breaks needle at your nerves like so many sharp little teeth. 

You see their looks, their pity. You see Jones glance at you and quickly look away, and you want to put him through a wall. No, wait. A window. Defenestration is _such_ a lovely term, isn’t it dearest? Do you think he’d break the glass, be cut to ribbons? Or would you have to open the window and _throw_ him out? 

You think you’d like the latter best. Your hands itch with the need to move, to break, to scour something bitter and broken from inside yourself. 

It’s been a year. You look _good_. You’ve built your body back up like it was before _(it’ll_ never _be like it was before),_ all hard planes and god, love, you’d have no shortage of partners in your bed if you could only bear it. You hear them speculate, little whispers in break rooms and corridors. Would you be tender, or would you _ravage_ them? _(You’d bury yourself in them and bite at the back of their neck, you’d get them off but leave yourself aching, wouldn’t you dear)_ You’re a character in their fantasies and it _doesn’t matter._

It’s cold. Your bones ache. You pour a coffee, wait for the briefing. Apostles again. You’ve been sent on the hunt before and have no doubt it’ll be you again and again, until every one of them has been brought to heel before you, until every one of them has seen your face for the last time. You spend more time in the field than anywhere else, you see the guilt in the eyes of your superiors and their relief when you accept your mission, when you take up the hunt yet again. 

You wake before dawn with a shiver and shake, gathering your gasping breaths and your tears and shoving them down inside yourself. You flatten your fingers against your chest to stop them trembling, rub the pads of your thumbs over pink scars that are finally softening, loosening. You breathe until you feel like you can rise. 

You wash your face and pour your coffee and watch the sun come up alone. You haven’t brought anyone into your bed, not since before. 

Before— you skip over the thought, circle around it, prod at it like a bruise. You _can’t._ Not yet. _You can’t ignore it, love._ Not while there’s work to be done. And there is _so much_ work to be done. You’re weaving threads, laying the groundwork to build a better world. Your plans solidify, are codified in the manifesto you write at night when you can’t sleep. 

It’s been two years. You grow a mustache. On your anniversary you’re hunting in Vienna when you meet Hammond, trading secrets. They buy you a coffee and bring you back to their room. It doesn’t matter, until it does. You shave, straight razor sliding against your skin, watching the reflection of Hammond getting dressed. When you make your report you say you saw nothing and no one. A false lead. Better luck next time. 

You press your fingers flat to stop them from trembling. You take your tears and sighs and shove them deep inside yourself. You blink silently from sleeping to waking. You’re sent out in the field again and again, and you earn your name. Your reputation. 

You bring back reports, documents, bodies. Never live targets. You receive reprimands and accolades in equal measure. You sit with your coffee and watch the sun come up. 

—-  
**“The trick...is not minding that it hurts.”  
-Lawrence of Arabia**

When you interrogate them it’s purposeful but never pretty. And Sloane doesn’t mind, does she, or she wouldn’t keep sending you, dear. She knows her good boy, her mad dog, her _hammer_ will get the job done one way or another. Sure, she’d _prefer_ you to bring these Apostles in-house for interrogation, but she trusts you enough not to question your methods. 

You take out this latest target in a way that surprises even you. When you’re in the shower after, washing the man’s blood and shit and half-digested dinner from your body, you lean your head against the tile and close your eyes. The lights in your mind blink and buzz. 

This one knew your face. Hadn’t turned yet, but you know how fortune favors the prudent. If he’d been just a little quicker he could’ve bargained his way to a few years in a cushy cell. Instead, he’s rotting by degrees in the other room. You’re pretty sure parts of him ended up in the ceiling fan. _Call the cleaners, love._ You’ve got a report to make. 

You need a new suit. You choose one off the rack, something boxy that hides the tower of your body. Hides muscle and sinew and the strength to tear a man apart with your bare hands. _Keep your secrets, dear one. Take the hard, dark center of yourself and lock it away. Love I will find you I will find you I will catch you._

You wake from nightmares but you never scream or shake. Your eyes flash open and you breathe in until your pupils widen to normal, until you can stand without being sick. But you never move, never gasp, never give yourself away. You’ve trained yourself too well, and now you wear the memory like an old shirt. You tug and twist at it, trying to make it fit if you can’t be rid of it. 

This is the last one. The last one who could have given the game away, but won’t because already this one can no longer speak, can no longer do _anything_. Blood blooms on the carpet. You’ve never met your cleaning crew but they surely know your handiwork. You know that whispers of your methods circulate among the other agents, whispers that precede you down every corridor and into every room. It’s so much _easier_ , dearest, when they’re afraid. 

The anniversary of your imprisonment arrives and like always, you spend the day trying to will your life to leave your body. Like always, it doesn’t work. So you find someone tight-bodied and easily pleased to bury yourself in, someone whose mind stutters and catches on the hard planes of your body, someone who won’t ask questions when you turn them over so they can’t see your face. 

You grow your schemes. Dearest, the best parts of you have been shredded by time and torment but the pieces still remain. Your cleverness, your fortitude, your stubbornness. You gather those who you can trust around you. You find a man who can work miracles with nuclear weapons. You ask Hammond for a favor. You find others, smaller-minded, who can be convinced to cast their lot in with you. You wish the world would burn so that you might rise. _Wishes and horses, dear one._

You scheme and scheme, laying out circles of plans. Each plan with a failsafe, each plan layered with redundancies. You’re meant to shepherd the world into a better state through fire and pain, but you can’t _save_ the world if you’re not _in_ it. So you scheme and plan and every night you hope to hell you don’t dream. 

—-  
**Burn it to the ground (reprise)**

If there is nothing else in this world there is pain and you know it. You know from the way your thumbnails never grow quite right, the way your spine stiffens when it rains, the way you rush to stay just far enough ahead of your own schemes. 

When they learn of your duplicity, it’s just business. And it doesn’t matter, either way. You have your ace and you are _so close_ , even the tracker below your skin is there because you _want_ it to be. But then your ace is up someone else’s sleeve. They catch you, they bind you and hood you and after that it’s a long dark journey back to your roots. So to speak. 

They drag you down to a bright room where the fluorescent bulbs buzz and hum overhead. 

And oh, my darling, it’s just like you remember. 

Let’s start slowly, shall we dearest? You have ten fingers and ten toes, and they have nothing but time. They leave razor cuts in the whorls of your fingerprints but you don’t cry, you never cry, dearest, because pain is your trade. They open you slowly, and you bloom under the bright lights. You see the red wet glistening center of yourself. You greet your white bones by name. You sigh on the very precipice of death and they pull you back. They always pull you back. 

You have ten fingers. Then one day, you have eleven. They bring you a new one, slender, delicately calloused, a freckle just behind the second knuckle. 

My darling, my dear, they speak to you but you cannot seem to hear them over the roar of blood in your ears. You’ll give them anything, but how can you give what you don’t have, when you don’t even know what they want?

You hold a ghost in your hands. Piece by piece it grows. Its voice in your ear: _I’m here, I’m here, steady your heart._

They ask you nothing, but you tell them everything. Names and dates and coordinates they don’t need. They spit your crimes at you and then you understand. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter what you say because they already know. These are their secrets you share back to them, but you have nothing else to give. 

They shave you smooth to better see the planes and angles of your face. To better see your cheeks hollow around the screams that they finally shake loose. To better see your one eye roll back when they take the other from you. 

You forget yourself and they remind you. They lave your wounds and kiss you tenderly when they hold pieces of you up to the light. _This is your betrayal, this your plan that left us scattered._

Your ghost grows. Sometimes you swear it speaks to you from where it moulders on the floor. _Dearest, will you wait for me?_

This is the last spark of hope dying in your chest. When they find it, they flay you open and watch it wink out in the open air. 

Love, there is so little of you left. You have nothing left except your spite and though you know they’ll kill you, at the least you’ve made them _work_ for it. 

Your wounds become scabs become scars and you mark time that way. 

You forget yourself and they remind you. They remind you. They remind you. 

One day you wake and a face from your memory is there, their scarred hand reaching to stroke your cheek. One day they lift you and carry you home, tuck you into bed and kiss you full of all the words you didn’t say. 

In the morning the room is bright and oh my darling. 

It’s just like you remember. 

—-  
**Burn it to the ground (last dance)**

When they took your eye, what did you gain? There’s no give without take, no push without a pull. Odin wanted wisdom, what is it you asked for?

A bed far from here, sunshine slanting into your eyes, their hair on your pillow and in your mouth as you tangle in the warm weight of their sleep?

Bombs exploding, cleansing the world with fire and poison?

Your blood on the _inside_ of your body?

When they take your eye, my darling, the manwith the scalpel is a newcomer making his first cuts. You baptize him with your blood and vitreous humor. 

He turns, is sick. They coo and clap for their fledgling, praise him with the same words they use when they prise your fingernails from their scarred beds. _Good, you’re doing so well. Gently now, dear._ For once, no one watches you. Dear heart, make your move. Dear heart, grasp this shard of wire and secret it inside yourself. 

Wait. 

_Hold your heart steady, dear one._

Wait. 

The hardest thing about opportune moments, dear, is knowing when they’re happening. 

Wait. 

Now. Now is your moment. You can’t grasp the wire, you fumble it with your ruined fingers, can’t get it loose. But you still have teeth, haven’t you? Then _bite_ it out. 

Work the wire in the locks, make yourself free. Creep down the corridors. 

It’s just like you remember. 

Hide in the shadows, find some clothes, find a—

—a window. The sun. You can see sunlight. _You can see sunlight._

And you know where you are. 

And now they see you. 

They see you but you are supposed to be one half-starved half-blind man chained up safe and snug, and they are not prepared. 

You get lucky. You activate the sprinkler system and duck into the stairwell while they’re blinded by murky water. You stumble and trip to ground level and it hurts you, it hurts you with every step. You pull your stolen coat tight around yourself and take your first breath of fresh air. 

You have no money, no shoes, no one who even knows you’re alive. You’ll never fire your gun again without a half second of doubt, a recalibration to account for your lack of depth perception. 

But you are _alive,_ and you can see sunlight. 

When you reach the secret safe house, the one _none_ of them knew about, you sit down with your laptop and send out a call. It’s time to get to work. 

—-  
**Scars (rise up, rise up)**

Your scars itch. They always fucking _itch_ but your hands stay still at your sides because what’s a little itch after everything? You hold yourself still while you wait for messages to trickle in from your satellite connection. You hold yourself still while you rub silicone gel into skin shiny with scars (so tight, so tight, you just want to be able to move without hurting). You hold yourself still when you reach one hand slowly to your cock and just as slowly let your fingers fall open, let your hand drop away. Your fingernails are growing back ridged and lumpy. Maybe someday you’ll be able to button your shirt without wanting to scream. 

Your friends are fewer than you thought. In the long months since you’ve been gone, so much has happened. Lane, dragged back into the depths just as you were, but unlike you he lacks the _fortitude_ (the dumb luck, the keen disregard for fate) to make it out. Apostles scattered to the winds like so many ashes. Hunt, given fresh license to fuck everything up. His chaos set free, bought with your blood. 

Your one eye aches and burns with the strain of so many hours at your screen, calling in every favor you can from those few who remain. Hammond, Symon, Ross. A few others, nebulous maybes. None with any real pull. But four is better than one is better than none. 

You sleep sometimes, when you have no other choice, when your pen falls from suddenly slack fingers. You lie still wherever you fall until _darling_ you wake, clammy with sweat, eye roving. You sleep sometimes, marking time by the gaps in your consciousness. You sleep sometimes and if you dream, you tell yourself you don’t remember. _Remember, dearest, remember the needle. Remember the scalpel._

You rub silicone gel into scars. You stretch, and stretch, and stretch your limbs, uncurling yourself, lengthening the line of your body. You work your muscles until slowly, slowly, you feel your strength returning. You see your reflection in the mirror _love_ and bloody your knuckles breaking the glass. You rub antiseptic into your cuts. You rub silicone gel into your scars. 

Your scars itch. 

You shave by touch, the straight razor steady in your hand. _Steady._ You clip the line of your mustache back into order, smooth your cheeks. You feel as though you’re rising from the depths. You look good. _Darling._

Fuck. 

You fetch the antiseptic, rub it into your cuts. You breathe deep. You start again. 

—-  
**Easy (cool blue shade)**

You wake, stretching languorously, in your actual bed for once. You wake to the slide of rain down the window, to the soft sound of your own sigh. It’s not till you’re halfway out of bed that you realize. Nothing hurts. It’s almost hollow, this absence of aches. Your heart beats steadily in your chest, your breaths are balanced and easy. You pause, waiting. 

Rain falls. 

And you feel the insistent thrum of blood pulsing in your cock. 

When you close your fist around yourself, when you make that first tentative stroke, you have to brace yourself against the fire that friction ignites. It’s too hot, too dry, the drag of it pulling a pained gasp from you. 

But. For the first time since you came to this place you feel like you can. 

So you do. In the wan light you lick your palm and pull at yourself in a way you’ll regret later. The scars on your fingers surprise you with new sensations and for once you don’t think of anything. You give yourself over to sensation, to this pleasure tinged with rasping pain. 

But. 

The air is chilly on your bare skin. A draft raises gooseflesh on the back of your neck. It feels like a breath, _dear._

Your orgasm tears loose from the knobs of your spine and wrenches your legs out from under you. You kneel there until the cold creeps into your knotted bones. Until you can unclench your fingers from where they dig bruises into your flesh. Until you lift your gaze and see your laptop on the desk, message window blinking. 

—-  
**Paradise (let the light in)**

If you leave the curtains open you can let the light in. But if you leave the curtains open you’re a target. So you scratch at yourself in the dark and wait. Messages are coming in. You’ll need to move, need to meet the others but you aren’t exactly inconspicuous. Never were, no matter how you hid yourself in your cheap suits, no matter how you feigned dumb and hotheaded. Never had to reach far, though, did you? 

Twenty days to Copenhagen, twenty days to meet Hammond. You have no doubt that every inch of you is flagged on watchlists worldwide, so you trade one precious secret for passage on a cargo freighter out of Georgia, bundled into a cabin in its stinking rusted hold. 

Twenty days at sea. The fluorescent lights in your cabin blink and hum, and you’re sick all over your tiny washroom. When you go up into the open air the salt spray tightens your skin, makes your scars itch. 

You wash your face and don’t look at yourself in the square of metal that passes for a mirror. You creep your fingers around the edges of your eye socket. You are violently seasick. 

You rub silicone gel into your scars. 

Twenty days at sea. Once a day a satellite passes overhead and you cast your net for messages. Mostly nothing, but one day you receive an address and a passcode, ciphered in a familiar hand. 

You shave by touch. You clip your mustache into order because you need _something_ to feel normal, to feel—

You close the door on that thought, though it seeps poison over the edge of your mind. 

You lie on your cot, staring at the lights. You think about nothing. You think about nothing. You scratch your arms and knuckle the salt spray from your eye. You think about nothing. 

You dream a little, dream a tightening red spiral of light shining through the drips and splashes of your blood. You dream of hands that grasp and hold and _break._ The lights blink and hum and whisper your name. _August, love, won’t you come to bed? It’s late._

You are violently seasick. 

You read borrowed spy novels that you can’t finish. You check for messages but nothing new comes in. You pace your room. Three steps forward, turn, three steps back. You pull yourself up on an exposed pipe over and over and over until the blisters on your hands break and trickle lymph. You sleep. You _don’t_ dream. 

The port comes into view. You stand on the deck, hands still at your sides, fingers aching from the cold. You breathe deep, tasting salt, the cold air burning your lungs. Your scars itch. 

—-  
**The hardest thing in this world**

You wake and everything hurts. Your bones ache, your scars itch. You wake and feel your skin too tight and too hot around you. You wake, eye roving, heart in your throat. You wake. You wake. 

It’s strange, isn’t it dear. Sharing this space, learning how to live in someone else’s orbit. It’s not like it was before, a quick fuck when you happened to share the same timezone. It’s all mundane, all dishes in the sink and hearing them rustle down the hall to their room at night. It’s all cleaning your guns side by side and sewing buttons back onto your shirts (and you still have trouble holding the needle, don’t you dear). It’s all waking to the smell of breakfast drifting in from the kitchen, it’s fucking around with the satellite dish on the roof, it’s making plans and sipping coffee with your elbows on the windowsill. It doesn’t matter if you catch and hold their gaze just a little too long. It doesn’t matter if your fingers touch when you pass the gun oil in the evening. 

It doesn’t matter, until it does. 

Winter comes and your plans begin to cohere. You send messages, spend money that isn’t yours, move your allies into position. You find something better than bombs. You can see the end, see a brighter and a better world. You send Symon after Hunt’s team and receive a message of success: _target eliminated._ You celebrate by getting so drunk you can’t stand up. 

Hammond’s feet cross your vision as they carry their laptop to the couch. You drift away to the soft susurrus of typing. In the morning you wake stiff and sore, with a headache that won’t quit. You test out a smile, feel the strange way it stretches your face. 

Hammond sighs, steps falsely loud as they approach. You see it, this consideration, and you hate how it makes you feel, like something inside you is breaking open. “Come to bed, love. It’s late.”

You work them open and writhing with your fingers and tongue, the strange patterns of your fingertips making them _howl._ And when you push inside you have to drop your head and just. breathe. through it. It’s so much, all at once. It’s been so long, you can’t possibly last. But you finish them with your tongue and hear them cry out their benediction. 

You wake to a sleepy sigh and a murmured, “morning.”

You wake with a hand skating low over your belly, fingers tangling in coarse hair. You feel your muscles shudder and jump, and the breathless chuckle against your neck that means they noticed. You feel slick fingers skating down your thigh, nudging you to move your leg _just so._ You feel—

You feel empty-headed and undone. Their fingers fill you up until you gasp and shake yourself empty, and when you lick your own spend from your hand you _feel_ their soft, punched-out “ _oh_ ” against your skin. 

You wake to sun, to rain, to snow. But now you don’t wake alone.

You lie in bed and watch snow falling outside, arm around their shoulders, tangled in the warm weight of their sleep. 

You lie in bed. Something sparks in your chest, something small and precious. 

—-  
**Shiver and shake**

There’s one last thing you have to do. One last loose end. 

An amended report. _Hunt, deceased. Stickell: deceased. Dunn:??_ You claw back your scream, hold yourself still and silent until you can hear over the roar of blood in your ears. You crack a tooth from how hard you clench your jaw. 

This shouldn’t be happening. Not now, when you have all the pieces together. Now you have this one last problem to deal with. One IMF agent who’d slipped from your grasp. The little squirrelly one, the one who’d stolen your best secret from you, the one whose cleverness sent you into hell. Dunn. He wants to see you. 

_Wants to see you._ That’s one way to put it. You can almost _taste_ the venom in his words, in the precise way his message marches across the screen. You close the laptop, breathe as deeply as you dare. It’s nothing. _It’s nothing._

You get your shaving kit, hold the case out to Hammond. _Ask._ You sit and bare your throat. 

_A fox will gnaw off its own limb to get free of the snare._

Each stroke of the razor lights up your nerves, sends a cold thrill crawling up your spine. _All it would take is the smallest slip. If—_

They pause at your upper lip. _Ask._ Shave you smooth. _Ask._ Dry your face, brush cool fingers across your mouth. You draw their fingers into yourself, lave them with your tongue. _Ask._

In the end you don’t say anything. _Can’t_ say anything. You gather your coat around yourself. Even now, old cuts and breaks send lines of pain through you with each button. All it takes is time, dear. 

On the way to meet Dunn, you make a call. You speak the words, set something in motion that cannot be undone. 

You make one more call, leave one last message. You whisper three words down the line. It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright. You’ll be alright. 

—-  
**Hope to hell (heaven won’t have you)**

The meeting takes place at an abandoned warehouse and you could just cry with how cliche that is. Dunn very carefully doesn’t look at you. He’s scared shitless but he’s here and he holds steady, and you can’t help but admire that. He’s also here to kill you, for whatever that’s worth. 

He sent you into hell, but then again you _did_ kill his friends. And there’s no fairness, no even-Steven, no rhyme or reason to any of this. Some live and some die, that’s all. 

He speaks but you’re not really listening because the words are the same as always. Instead, you watch his hands. They don’t move from where they’re jammed deep in his coat pockets. He shifts, twitches. Doesn’t look at you. His gaze flicks up to— 

Fuck. 

Someone else is here. 

_I told you, love. I will find you._

He doesn’t want you _dead_ , he wants you back in your room where you lie bound and burning and waiting. He wants _justice,_ or vengeance, it ends the same for you. It ends when they reach for you as the lights blink and hum, love, when they caress you with their knives. When they take your other eye and leave you to the dark. 

Clever little man. You didn’t notice, didn’t even imagine that he’d know how to cut so deep. But you see Hammond there above you, caged, bare feet brushing against the concrete floor. So you take the only path left you can see, and rush at Dunn. His hands aren’t in his pockets anymore. The smell of cordite fills your nose and you’re torn open but momentum carries you forward. 

And it hurts, doesn’t it dear, when the warm red wet begins to run down your legs. You’ve got him, his stupid little neck snapped like so much kindling, but you’re leaving too much of yourself here. If you could see yourself, you’d see daylight shining through your fingers where you clutch at your guts, at the wet red ropes of yourself, trying to hold yourself together. 

—-  
**“Nearly all the songs are lies except this one.”  
—The Broken Family Band**

Snow falls. You leave little pieces of yourself behind as you stagger up the steps to the cage, your blood freezing almost before it hits the ground. Your fingertips are going numb, not entirely from cold. Love, you were _careless._ Love, you are _afraid._

_I told you I would find you. Catch you. You are bound to me, to this blinking light._

You stagger toward them, stumbling up the steps, taking the last few on your knees. _Crawl_. It hurts, doesn’t it dear. You reach for the lock and your hand leaves a bloody swipe. You blink once, twice. 

Nothing comes without cost. This world will burn and though you regret you won’t live to see it, at least there will be someone to carry on in your stead. At least. 

Snow falls. You collapse, body letting go at last. You see bare feet, toes dirty with grit and meltwater. Then hands, fingers clutching chain link, a worried face. You close your eye. 

“Forgive me.” 

_Love, I never left you. When you writhed in the dark of your dreams I cradled you. When the cold bit at your broken bones, I bit at you too. Love—_

“Don’t leave me. Please.” Your words in their mouth. 

You rise, gasping wet around air that’s too heavy, too thick. 

Snow falls. 

You rise. 

—-  
**Epilogue**  
_More than you deserve._

What do you think? Have you earned your happy ending? When you fell at your lover’s feet, guts tangled in your fingers, you figured that was the end, right? 

Love. 

_Love._

Look around you. 

What do you see? White sheets, white walls, everywhere white. And you hurt, love, don’t you. God, how you _hurt._

But somehow, impossibly, you’re alive. And you’re not alone. 

In the corner, Hammond sleeps, curled up under their wrinkled coat. Sunlight streams in through the window. You can see sunlight. _You can see sunlight._

_Love, I’ll never let you go. But love, I am patient._


End file.
